


Are You Now

by byzantienne



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Drama, Gen, Historical, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-18
Updated: 2009-01-18
Packaged: 2017-10-03 07:43:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The trick to being a spy is forgetting you are a spy, until you need to be one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Are You Now

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for coercion (non-sexual), being a spy, and what that does to your head. McCarthyism. Also Russia. Warnings for Russia.

**circa 1952 C.E.**

Russia's front parlor has a filigreed fireplace, huge and made in the old Baroque style. The painted roses in lavender and green on the curlicues of its mantle are peeling, but the gold leaf persists, catches the light of the fire and shimmers dustily, an impossible heat mirage that extends barely inches before it is pressed back by the chill of the room. The wind outside rattles the panes of glass in their windowframes, pushes snow in drifts high enough to cover the sills.

Lithuania shivers. Russia holds out a hand to him.

"You are cold, my Lietuvos," he says, standing so close to the flames that Lithuania finds himself wondering if the ends of his scarf might catch, "Come. Let us build up the fire together."

Lithuania is carrying pieces of a chair. The intricate back is broken in two parts and it fills up his arms. Russia brushes the back of his hand against Lithuania's cheek and plucks one half from him. He lifts it easily. His smile is distant. Lithuania doesn't want to think it sweet.

"France gave these to me," Russia says. He tosses the piece he's carrying onto the hearth, sends up a shower of sparks.

They go out like fireflies in summer. "--do you want me to find something else to use?" Lithuania asks, hesitant. There are rooms full of furniture in Russia's house, rooms that no one uses, in the attics where Lithuania can see his breath cloud in the air even on the warmest days. Rooms and rooms, in the enormity of this place --

"Lietuvos," Russia says, so gently, "Why would I want to keep a remembrance of such decadence," his hand settles on the back of Lithuania's neck, heavy pressure that only hurts by intimation, "such profligacy? When France rejoins us he will learn better, simpler joys."

The rest of the chair goes onto the flames. The temperature of this room never changes. There's thin heat on Lithuania's face, drying his skin, chapping his lips, and the chill cups his spine like a hand. Russia wraps his arm around Lithuania's shoulders, pulls him smotheringly close.

He has stopped resisting these lesser, common insults to himself -- a betrayal, and not a small one, and that rests in his gut like a paralyzing weight while Russia surrounds his chin in a callused work-rough palm and tips his eyes up so that all he can see is palest lavender, a shade lighter than the filigree roses, more like the tracery of ice on the windows, illuminated by the declining sun. Russia smiles. Lithuania does not look down, does not look away. He wants to. He knows what defiance would instigate, intimately --

_\-- the discarded and red-stained bodies of his executed partisans, his **meža brāļi**, displayed like placards or posters in the centers of their own villages, red and white on the snow in the best Soviet Realist style -- _

Russia's lips are centimeters from his when Lithuania says, "Russia, I -- "

Russia's arms envelop him, enclose him. He cannot breathe. There are fingers in his hair. They pull, tilt him up onto his tiptoes, into an arch, _hurt_ \-- "Go on," Russia says.

He tries to keep terror from unevening his speech, from preventing the air from moving through the ridged unnatural curve of his throat into his lungs. "I -- I was wondering if -- America used to trust me," he manages, goes on before Russia can say anything at all, before his hand descends in a blow, "I know he threatens -- us, he threatens us and I could go and -- tell you what he's doing."

The blow he expects is not a blow but a stroke, heavy, sliding down to the base of his spine. "Why would America concern you?" The heavy, blunt nails twist, there. Lithuania thinks his skin breaks, but he can't be sure.

What Lithuania says next is a lie, he believes it is a lie, _it must never not be a lie._

"I believe in the greatness of the Communist Party," he says -- his voice sounds resigned, pained, he cannot change that, even for eventual -- _hoped-for_ \-- defiance -- "Isn't that reason enough?"

It takes Russia too long to respond. He holds Lithuania still the entire time, watching his face, watching his eyes -- until the muscles in his shoulders cramp, the muscles of his thighs shake with keeping his feet on the floor. "Yes," Russia says, finally, "yes. You may go to America, you may tell him," that hand is gone from his hair and Lithuania gasps from relief from the strain, slumps against Russia's chest, "tell him how good it is to be one with Russia." His smile is not cold except that everything about him is cold. His fingers pet at Lithuania's shoulders, write apologies and horrid comfort against the fabric of his shirt, all the way down to his skin, deep enough that Lithuania thinks he will never get them out.

"It is very kind of you, my Lietuvos, to go into the world alone for me."

\---

America is not like what Lithuania remembers. The war has changed him, too -- made him colder, faster, stranger than he was the last time Lithuania stood in Grand Central Station in New York City, watching all of his people swarm through, an army of briefcases and dark coats, bright hair and eyes behind glasses, looking forward and upward but never at one another, never down. Lithuania is still waiting for America himself. He has a telegram in the breast pocket of his suit, just a few words. America is glad he came, it says. Alfred will come meet him, it says.

It does not ask him where he's been.

Lithuania feels shabby in the threadbare wool of his coat, odd in its Eastern European cut. He remembers a jazz band, under the enormous green and gold celestial ceiling of the terminal, all the constellations lit up, tiny pinprick illuminations through the tobacco-smoke grime staining the plaster, glittering down on America's city and America's music. The year of our lord nineteen hundred and twenty-six.

Sometime while he's been -- sometime since then, America has repainted all the plaster, and it's green, unblemished, nothing marring it at all. No sound but the tramping of feet, the busy chatter of men on their way to work, the clatter of women's heels.

America's arms go around him from behind and squeeze the air from his chest in a hug.

Lithuania's smile when he turns around, looks up into America's face, is not forced. Not after the first terrifying instant. It's easier than he thought it would be to be glad to see him, straight white teeth grinning and easy stance, swagger that isn't militant as much as it is _assured_.

"Liet!" America says, clapping him on the shoulder. "Welcome back! "

Lithuania tries to match the intensity of that gaze. "I'm glad to be here," he says. He hasn't lied yet.

"I just bet you are." America doesn't stay still, rocks back on his heels and then forward, and then sets off across the marble floor, talking back over his shoulder, beckoning Lithuania to follow with his voice. "You're going to love what we've done with the place!"

\---

America is right. Lithuania does love what America is turning himself into, loves it with a kind of frantic appreciation that he thinks, when he has time to think, is equal parts shock and relief. He feels light-dazzled, blinded by speed and bright colors, like a diver saturated with nitrogen surfacing too fast.

America takes him downtown, through the Manhattan subways, past women in full-skirted collared dresses, in flowers, past men in broad-shouldered, broad-tied suits, down to Greenwich Village, where the streetlamps almost remind Lithuania of gaslight and the bar that America shows him into is full of smoke and a crowd and an expectant, talkative stillness.

On the raised stage, by the microphone, is a tall man in a black t-shirt and a black beret and an enormous chaotic beard, and when he wraps his hand around that microphone and speaks into it, Lithuania thinks _my God, America has discovered poetry_, and he cannot stop smiling.

America taps his fingers to the beat, runs their pads over the woodgrain of their table, and if he looks a little out of place, his shirt too white and his pants too pressed and his tie too pinned surrounded by all this black, these words, his people alive and wild and strange around him -- even so -- surely --

\---

His eyes are still shut even though he is perfectly awake, floating boneless with blankets cocooning every one of his limbs, and Lithuania could be anywhere at all -- anywhere warm, anywhere safe. It could be May, sunlight through the windows of Vilnius, spring in nineteen twenty-three, and in a moment Lithuania will go down to meet the freely-elected Second Seimas and they will discuss -- oh, educational reform, a university for Kaunas --

He opens his eyes before anyone, even America, can see his face contort in borrowed happiness.

He is not _anywhere_ warm, he tells himself. He is here because Russia has allowed him -- _sent_ him -- to be here, and because America has not noticed that yet.

His eyes fixed on the ceiling of America's house, Lithuania thinks as quietly as he can: _The trick to being a spy is forgetting you are a spy, until you need to be one._ And then, only a little louder, to remind himself: _None of your people are free, Lithuania, and neither are you._

Over breakfast, America smiles. Lithuania imitates him, easily.

\---

Las Vegas is a mirage, a hallucination made of this desert that sucks the moisture from Lithuania's skin and leaves his lips paper-thin, cracked and sometimes bleeding when he speaks too fast. He has nothing to compare this climate to, nothing save a story Russia told him once, about crossing the desert in Mongolia, on foot and alone and thirsty, and Lithuania suspects that story wasn't Russia's story at all.

Lithuania is not thirsty. America is pouring the drinks.

The scientists, stripped down to their shirtsleeves and khakis, skinny elbows bare where they are bent over craps and roulette, are on leave from one of America's laboratories -- _sorry, no, can't tell you where it is, but it's that one, y'know? The one where we built the big one!_ and a grin, a grin wide enough to split the sky like he split the atom -- they're on leave and they're giddy with it. Everyone who isn't drinking whiskey is drinking vodka. Lithuania could say something about vodka, but it really wouldn't be politic right now. Right here.

Besides, he's drinking it too. In shots.

A narrow-shouldered, dark-haired man proposes a toast, glass in one fist and dice in the other. "To those bastards at Lawrence Livermore, may they find themselves in their own _new, experimental_ crosshairs!" That elicits general laughter, and a few cheers, a few more when the man -- one of the engineers, Lithuania thinks -- tosses his dice and wins the round. There are more toasts after that, a cascade of them, as if they'd bring luck. They toast to women, to universities, to the fortunes of the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Angels, to the amazing legs of the Theoretical Department's head secretary. One red-faced individual toasts to his mother and is laughed down; another, equally red-faced, toasts to Oppenheimer. No one laughs at that. They are too busy shouting.

Lithuania is watching America, so Lithuania sees America throw his head back, tilt himself sprawling on his barstool, toss his arms open and expansive, and not even notice anything different or amiss when someone climbs on top of a chair, waving a tumbler of whiskey so violently it spills out over the roulette wheel in an arching splatter of gold -- the spinning ball ricochets -- and say, loudly, "To Dr. Ulam and separating the tritium from the fission primary!"

_Hydrogen._

The ball settles with a click. Double zero.

_\-- until you need to be one -- _

The man on the chair flicks open a Bic lighter, a glint of silver and then a brighter glint of flame, fishes in his pocket for a cigarette. By the door, some wit is calling out, "Don't light that in here, you'll blow the whole place up!"

The laughter after that is shrieking, massive. America is laughing too. America is right at home.

\---

Lithuania cleans up, afterward, as much as it is possible to clean up. He puts the empty bottles in a line, tallest to shortest, picking them up off the floor. Every time he bends the world spins, resettles, spins. America is playing with sticky shotglasses, shifting them around each other in figure eights. Lithuania thinks he is drunk, too.

He closes his hand over one of those shotglasses, and America looks -- _up_, looks up at him. Not smiling, not anymore.

Lithuania says, his tongue thickened twice over, once from drink and once from hopelessness, "Russia is destroying me. Russia is taking everything I am and everything I have and I need --"

"That's why I built the bomb," America says, blithe. Undulled. "Russia fucks with everybody."

Whatever he's looking at, his brows knitted just fractionally over those glasses, it's not Lithuania.

So Lithuania turns away.

\---

"Hey! Hey, Liet!"

America is staring out the window, his shoulders hunched inside his jacket. One of his hands is on the windowframe and the other is somewhere Lithuania can't see.

"Liet, come here! There's something I need to ask you!"

Lithuania does. It's dark outside America's house, oppressive and heavy. He isn't sure how America can see anything through the window at all. He leans in, his nose almost pressed against the glass, peering, the radiate warmth of America still and poised to his left --

America grabs his shoulder and shoves him so hard into the windowframe that he cries out, high-pitched, _surprise_ and a bloom of terror radiating out from America's hand where the thumb has pressed against the base of his throat, hard enough to bruise, he thinks --

"Hey, Liet," America says, lightly. "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"

America's other hand has a gun and it's nestled against Lithuania's temple.

He gapes up at America, wanting to shiver and making himself be still instead. America isn't smiling. America is just looking at him, searching him with those endless blue eyes behind the glasses, his eyebrows just beginning to knot together. Lithuania can see a raw abrasion where America has gnawed his lower lip open, red and irritated.

_Which answer gets me killed?_ Lithuania doesn't say.

"I really need to know," says America, almost apologetically.

_Not an apology_, Lithuania thinks, _an apology would be -- worse -- **he** doesn't -- America doesn't -- apologize -- _

The gun hasn't moved. It's steady in America's grip, not pressing, just resting, the barrel a closed, cold circle on his skin.

His mouth is so dry that his tongue feels swollen. He's afraid he'll choke on it, strangle himself instead of speaking. _Don't look away,_ he tells himself, _don't look down_ \-- meets America's eyes -- says, "No," says it louder, stronger, "No, I'm not," like he believes it --

The gun disappears. America sighs, smiles -- the smile is forced, Lithuania can tell, forced but relieved. One of his arms goes around Lithuania's shoulders, props him back up on his feet, squeezes him in a brief hug. "I just had to make sure," America says, and ruffles Lithuania's hair, like he's his kid brother.

Lithuania doesn't flinch because he's learned better. "I know," he manages.

America shoves his hands into his pockets. "It's just that you spend all that time with Russia," he says. "It really makes a guy wonder what his friends are getting into. I dunno. It was just a thought."

_You have no idea,_ Lithuania thinks -- and then stops thinking, because it will show on his face, it will, and then -- _you never had any idea even when I tried to tell you._

\---

Lithuania watches the sun come up through those dark windows, curled in the corner of America's couch with his knees almost tucked under his chin. He means to write a letter but he can't figure out what to say. How much he wants to say. If he wants to write at all. He put down the pen hours ago, down on the floor with the pad of foolscap paper he took from beside America's typewriter. It glints now, when the fragile light catches the clip on its cap.

Even if he wrote that letter, he'd have to send it. Without America knowing. Without America guessing.

He thinks about blood, and the snow, and the color that this light would turn that red, and wonders if he's ever been safe, anywhere, anywhere at all.

"I need your help," America says.

Lithuania shudders when he breathes next, but he unfolds, sits up straight and brushes his hair out of his eyes when he turns toward America and says, " -- how?"

"I can't trust just anybody," America tells him, earnestly. His face is so clear, so open. "Not with this. Not with anything, you never really know anyone, Liet, huh? People can say -- can say they really care about you and then it turns out they're fucking Commies. Nice people. You'd never guess how many people, Liet."

He could guess.

"You get it, though! I know you do! Better dead than red -- you know _that_." America leans in, fast, a flash, everything about him bright and febrile. His hands are shaking where they brush against Lithuania's. "I can trust _you_. Right?"

"I -- America --"

"I need your help to tell me what the fuck Russia is trying to do to me."

_What he's already done to you._

Lithuania wonders if horror should feel so distant, if the frantic pounding of his heart should sound so far away, if he should be so fascinated by the way that dawn light flares against America's glasses and obscures his eyes. "-- how," he says, again. Softer.

"Go back. Write me. Tell me. I'll make sure you get what you need. Like -- at the UN, y'know? Whatever. Good interest rates at the World Bank. Trade agreements. Just --"

No. No, horror is still something close and suffocating. He puts his head in his hands. He thinks America reaches out toward him -- thinks, isn't sure, he doesn't touch him, he's quiet, a long blank moment where he doesn't speak and doesn't move and Lithuania isn't looking, can't look at America being still --

"Please," America says.

The shock makes him look up. America is staring at the floor, drowning somewhere inside the shoulders of his jacket.

"Yes," Lithuania says. "Yes."

\---  
.

**Author's Note:**

> [ What was happening in Lithuania.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_nationalist_partisans_1944-1953)
> 
>  
> 
> [America has discovered poetry.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_poetry)
> 
>  
> 
> [That laboratory near Vegas.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory)
> 
>  
> 
> [Why tritium matters.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_bomb)
> 
>  
> 
> [Are you now?](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism)
> 
>  
> 
> and also the soundtrack for this one: [Alan Ginsburg set to Tom Waits. "America (Closing Time)".](http://www.sendspace.com/file/4hps2j)


End file.
